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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

I am sad about WASM. It was a promise for epic greatness.

It has failed to deliver that - so much is clear now. You rarely see any awesome success story shown with regard to WASM nowadays. What happened to the old promises? "Electron will be SUPER fast thanks to WASM" or "use any language, WASM unifies it all for the larger browser ecosystem".

It feels as if WASM is on a step towards exctinction. Sure, it is mentioned, it is used, but let's be honest - only few people really use it. And that won't change either.

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Just recently I've compiled my side-project Rust game engine to WASM and it runs beautifully in the browser, as well as SSH2 to have a fully featured SSH implementation in the browser over a websocket transport.

It can obviously do amazing things, but the expectation for it to do replace webdev frontend code was always a huge misconception. Though recent developments have made DOM access without a JavaScript translation layer possible, so that might change!

I'd say the hype is still very much alive.

You're just feeling the "trough of disillusionment", after the initial hype of the technology wears off and reality sets in. If you pay attention and actually look at what it's being used for, it's clear that Wasm has been very successful and will be around for decades. It's not perfect, it has problems both solvable and not, but it is well-designed as a solid foundation and its usage is growing year after year. Let's be honest - you don't know what you don't know, and making grandiose statements backed up by no experience or understanding is worse than useless. I suggest you learn about the thing, if you're interested in what's good about it.

There used to be hype about Wasm, now it's a technology as any other. It's still used, and used a lot; it just doesn't get focused on as much.

Well there is Google Sheets, Microsoft Office, Figma, and some other heavier web apps.

Looks like you're getting down voted, but the folks at Mozilla seem like they agree and are working towards making WASM more first class in the browser: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first...

That's specifically about string-marshalling overhead, which is only a problem when trying to talk to the DOM from the WASM side (which arguably is a silly idea to begin with, but to each their own I guess).

The only failure of WASM is that it was overhyped beyond all reason. It's "just another" virtual instruction set, and for that it turned out pretty great. It's supported by Clang and by all browsers. That's already enough to make the whole idea work.

You don't hear much about it because for the people using it, web+wasm is "just another porting target", like Windows, macOS or Linux. WASM has become 'normal' and that's a good thing.

The main risk these days for WASM is feature creep, the spec is getting bloated with optional features (garbage collection etc...).

I like to think about it as a VM that all the major browsers agreed to implement, designed by a broad group of stake holders with lessons from past plugin and VM systems

For that it's pretty cool. I still wish we had DOM access though

Why would you write in C++ then wrap it in a C++ to JavaScript wrapper then wrap it in a JavaScript to C++ wrapper

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